I've searched this forum for "Slappy" and received three hits, but none of the previous posts was precisely related to my problem.

I picked up the Caravan Quest from Butch during my first visit to the Hub. This quest requires you to talk to Harold the mutant to find out about the Deathclaws, then talk to the nutcase Slappy to be teleported to the cave. Only in my game, Harold does his thing, but Slappy's dialog, even the initial conversation, never had an option to go to the monster cave.

My character has average stats, nothing below 5, but I just can't seem to get him to trigger the cave teleportation option.
Any thoughts?

You may not have exhausted all dialogue options needed with Harold.

Harold's current dialog options are all dead ends. He won't even attempt to talk about Deathclaws.

I tried boosting my stats w/ Mentats before talking w/ Slappy - I got one extra line of dialog, but it was also a dead end.

I had this problem too topic creator.

You have to make sure you're talking to ALL the right people and in the right order.

Talk to Butch about Deathclaws.

Talk to Beth or whatever the gun shop owner chicks name is about em.

Go talk to harry the ghoul about em.

THEN you go talk to slappy.

Do it in that order one right after the other, making sure you exhaust the deathclaw related dialog and it should take you to the cave.

It makes sense that you don't have the dialogue options regarding Deathclaws with Harry: you haven't been told that he knows about them, and could equally be asking anyone else in Hub about them. Since obviously it's impractical for your character to be asking the entire population of a city...Although I suspect that if you clicked 'tell me about' and then 'deathclaw' in Harry's dialogue the quest would progress properly.

I tried asking Harold about "Deathclaw", he said he didn't know anything about that.

Good news! I shut my machine down and left it for a few minutes. After a cold boot, I reloaded my saved game. Then I followed JackBurton's sequence of conversations, and both Harold and Slappy performed properly. Yay!

Now I have a new bug - my NPCs won't accept any items when I'm in "STEAL" mode with them, even if their inventories are empty. Stealing from them works fine, and I can donate weapons and other equipment just fine in "BARTER" mode, as they accept gratis trades without problem. But it's irksome to have to take two steps to exchange items rather than just one. Maybe this belongs in a separate thread?

Wow. Not sure I ever ran into that problem, and I probably can't help. Have you tried planting items on other NPCs? You can be caught doing so, so it's dangerous, but it might make a good test comparison.

Thanks for the idea! I tried it just now - none of the party NPCs would take anything in "STEAL" mode, but a Follower Scout NPC (one you can't open a dialog with) took items just fine. Then there was the corpse of a named NPC (with whom you could have a dialog), and he wouldn't take anything either.

So the bug seems related to named characters, rather than just NPCs in general.

Strange, and a bit intriguing, but besides offering that tidbit of diagnostic advice I've got nothing.

That's fine, and thanks again. I've got a fairly simple workaround, so I can keep playing my campaign. It's just a bit weird, is all.

Cheers!

I had the same problem as the OP. I went through the whole process of talking to people and managed to actually go to the cave by talking to Slappy. After seeing the dethat claw, however, I decided to leave the cave and come back after gaining a few levels. The problem is when I came back Slappy wouldn't let me go back. I skipped it and finished the game anyway.